A Question of Waiting
by harlequindreaming
Summary: It is infinitely more painful to wait for someone to come without knowing if there is still someone to wait for, than to just wait for someone to come. Dramione. Short fic, one-shot. Rated M for a mention of sex.


_**A/N **I'm waiting until summer vacation to update my Dramione WIPs mostly because I haven't had the time to really sit down and think their plots through (because everything's getting so complicated and I need to get all the facts straight!). In the meantime, though, here is a one-shot inspired by a blog entry I did some months back, and by my current life playlist. It's a bit short, but I felt I put in all I could._

_Recommended listenings, more for the mood than the actual lyrics: Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson, The Trapeze Swinger by Iron&Wine, and Hallelujah as covered by Bon Jovi._

_Enjoy? Read and review, please!_

**xxxxxxxxxx**

Of all things Harry Potter expected Hermione Granger to do on this cold winter night, coming out at four in the morning with hot chocolate was not one of them.

His first impression was that she no longer looked like she had been crying, and his second was that "no longer crying" was not necessarily a good thing. Her hair was wild, her eyebags stark purple against her pale skin. The places where she'd gripped her arms too hard were still red. His first urge was to reach over and hug her but he knew better than to touch her in this state. He also politely refrained from mentioning she looked like she'd been roughhoused in bed. Instead, he simply accepted the mug of chocolate that had come from Merlin-knew-where, and drank it with gratitude.

"Wha-?" The first syllable of the question had barely left his lips when she held up her hand for silence. He pursed his lips and looked back down at his chocolate, partly thankful for her interruption. He himself was not sure of what he'd wanted to ask her.

The forest was quiet around them, bathed in snow and moonlight, and though in his head the description sounded peaceful, Harry could see and sense it wasn't. There was a discord and a tension wracking the world to its core – the little world inside the tent and the big one outside of it. Harry felt himself absentmindedly turning to his left, where someone else should have been, then abruptly turning his head away when his throat tightened. The lights inside the tent were off. They never turned on lights anymore, only used their wands, because to turn on lights would mean turning them off and that would have been painful.

The patch of snow near his right foot suddenly turned warm and wet, and when Harry looked it was brown. Hermione was hastily recovering her mug, fingers fumbling to wrap around it. Harry saw a flash of silver on her wrist and knew that some things were far more painful to her than turning out the lights.

Waiting for someone to come without knowing if there was still someone to come was more painful than just waiting for someone to come, and infinitely more painful than turning out the lights.

"What if Prince Charming never showed up?"

So Hermione wasn't crying, but she was crazy. That was improvement?

"What?" Harry turned to face her fully but her gaze was trained very determinedly on the trees, as if somehow, somewhere, there might materialize a flash of platinum blonde.

"In Snow White." The mug was empty now, anyway, so Hermione flipped it about with her fingers as if her question was of no importance. "She wouldn't have woken up if Prince Charming hadn't come along and kissed her. What if he never had?"

Harry stayed very, very quiet.

"She'd been poisoned, hadn't she? Into a long, long sleep." The mug slipped again and this time Hermione made no moves to retrieve it, but she held her hands as if they still might catch it. "And she lay there, waiting, trusting he'd come along and kiss her to wake her up. But what if he hadn't? What if he hadn't found out? If he hadn't known where to go? What if-?"

"She would have waited."

The snow melted between his shoe and her sneaker and briefly the world smelled of chocolate.

"And waited."

Her palm pressed hard into the links around her wrist.

"And waited."

The hand withdrew to rub angrily at her cheek, and Harry tried very hard not to see the DM imprinted onto her skin, because noticing and remembering was infinitely more painful than turning out the lights. It was more painful to watch her waiting than to turn out the lights.


End file.
